Chapter 6: The Clerk at the Gate

Tao Rui, a Stadium quartermaster's clerk, came up Taiping Road at first light with his hands in the air and a ledger clamped under one arm.

Bai Jin watched him from the sniper walk through the gap in the gate trucks.

He was a thin young man in glasses and a jacket three sizes too big, and he walked stiffly, with his arms high.

"Alone," said Gong Ting, beside him, rifle on his shoulder. "I have eleven on the roofs. Nobody behind him."

"Is it a trap?"

"Could be," said Gong Ting.

"Then why are you smiling?"

"I'm not," said Gong Ting, whose face showed nothing.

Then a shot cracked from the far end of the street.

Dust jumped at the clerk's feet and he threw himself flat.

Two more followed, from a window on the third floor of a ruined pharmacy.

Bai Jin opened his mouth to shout for cover.

Gong Ting was already gone.

He went down the ramp and over the trucks in three strides and out into the road.

Bai Jin heard himself yell "Gong Ting!" at the top of his voice.

The big man scooped the clerk off the asphalt, threw him over one shoulder and ran back.

A bullet struck the gate trucks beside his head.

Bai Jin had both hands over his mouth.

The guards on the roofs fired back at the pharmacy window, and it went quiet.

Gong Ting dropped the clerk inside the gate and lay with his forearm over his eyes for a moment, breathing.

"You said it could be a trap," said Bai Jin, in a high, strange voice.

"It was. Just not for us."

"You went out into a street under fire. That wasn't in the contract."

"Under fire, my word." Gong Ting sat up. "Raise."

"I'll give you ten."

"Twenty," said Gong Ting.

"Fifteen and you let me look at your head."

"There's nothing wrong with my head."

"I'll be the judge of that," said Bai Jin, and discovered that his knees would not stop shaking.

The clerk sat in the old storeroom cage by the gate with a blanket round him, drinking tea in both hands.

He had a split lip, blood on his sleeve and ink on every finger.

His glasses were mended with tape.

"Tao Rui," he said. "I kept the Stadium's books."

"I can count, I can write, and I can't fight. Please don't send me back."

"Why are you here?" asked Bai Jin.

"Because I watched them cut the rations again last week."

"Qi Wenbiao's rations?" said Bai Jin, naming the Stadium's boss, the man they all called the Director.

"Everybody's. Half a bowl, once a day, for twelve hundred people."

Tao Rui put the ledger on the table between them.

"I keep the books. The Director keeps what's in them."

Bai Jin turned the cover.

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